Source-of-Truth Table¶
Governance artifact — instantiates Reconciliation After Drift
A declarative table that names, in advance, which system or role is authoritative for each field, state, or jurisdiction, so any later conflict has a predetermined winner.
Source-of-Truth Table is not a procedure that detects, counts, or repairs anything — it is the standing artifact that other reconciliation work consults to decide who wins. Its defining feature is that it settles authority in advance and declaratively: rather than adjudicating each conflict on its facts when it arises, it publishes a lookup keyed by field, state, jurisdiction, or record type, so that when two systems disagree, the answer to "which one governs here?" is already written down. It converts authority from a matter of convenience or seniority — whoever's system happens to be open, whoever argues hardest — into an inspectable policy. It is the reference every live reconciliation procedure leans on; it never runs a repair itself.
Example¶
A company's employee records live in three systems that keep drifting apart: the HR system, the identity provider (IdP) that controls logins, and a benefits platform. A role change updates one but not always the others, and staff keep asking which is "correct." The Source-of-Truth Table settles it once, field by field. Legal name, job title, and employment status: HR is authoritative — if the IdP disagrees, HR wins. Login identifier, group membership, and multi-factor status: the IdP is authoritative — HR's copy is a convenience mirror. Benefits elections and dependents: the benefits platform governs. The table also handles a jurisdiction split: for contractors in the EU subsidiary, the local HR instance overrides the global one on personal data. Now when a nightly sync finds a mismatch on job title, no one debates it — the table says HR governs that field, so the IdP's value is corrected to HR's. The artifact made no repair; it made the repair decidable before the mismatch ever occurred.
How it works¶
- Decompose the record. Break the shared referent into the fields, states, and contexts that can each have a different owner — authority is rarely uniform across a whole record.
- Assign an authoritative source per cell. For each field (optionally split by jurisdiction, time period, or record type), name the single system or role whose value governs when copies disagree.
- Publish the resolution rule. State plainly that, on conflict, the authoritative source's value is taken — the predetermined tie-break every consumer of the table applies.
- Govern changes to the table itself. Version and review the assignments, since an authority map that drifts from reality is worse than none.
Tuning parameters¶
- Assignment granularity — whole-record, per-field, or per-field-per-context authority; finer granularity captures reality (HR owns name, IdP owns login) but grows the table and its upkeep.
- Keying dimensions — whether authority varies by field only, or also by jurisdiction, time period, customer segment, or record type; more dimensions are more precise and more brittle.
- Default rule — what governs a field the table does not explicitly cover (most-recent-write, a named fallback source, or "escalate"); the default is where silent errors hide.
- Change cadence and ownership — how often the table is reviewed and who may amend it; a stale authority map quietly points repairs at a source that is no longer correct.
- Tie-break precedence — when two dimensions both apply (a global rule and a jurisdiction override), which takes priority.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is eliminating authority ambiguity before it becomes a fight: because the winner of every anticipated conflict is written down, reconciliations resolve consistently and inspectably instead of by whoever is loudest, and the table is the single place to encode that a record's authority is not monolithic. It is the classic system-of-record[n1] designation made explicit and field-level.
Its failure mode is the stale authority problem: the table names a source that has itself gone out of date or been disconnected from reality, so it confidently points every repair at the wrong value — a nominal authority that is no longer the real one. It also cannot see conflicts it never anticipated; a field or context missing from the table falls to the default rule, which is where unnoticed errors accumulate. The classic misuse is treating the table as correct because it exists, long after the systems beneath it were re-architected. The guarding discipline is to review the assignments on a cadence, check that each named authority is still recency- and reality-connected rather than merely nominal, and make the default rule an escalation rather than a silent guess — so a case the table did not foresee gets a human, not a wrong winner.
How it implements the components¶
source_authority— it is the explicit naming of the authoritative source, role, or rule for each field, state, or jurisdiction — the archetype's authority designation, made declarative and inspectable.conflict_resolution_rule— it supplies the predetermined tie-break (the authoritative source's value governs) that a reconciliation applies when representations conflict, without re-adjudicating each case.
It does NOT implement drift_detection_signal or mutation_pause_or_freeze — noticing that copies have diverged and halting movement while they are repaired is the work of live procedures like Inventory Count Reconciliation; nor the verification_check tie-out of Ledger Reconciliation Workflow. The table only declares who wins; the procedures that detect, freeze, and verify consume it.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Reconciliation After Drift — the standing authority policy that makes every downstream repair decidable.
- Sibling mechanisms: Ledger Reconciliation Workflow · Inventory Count Reconciliation · Custody Chain Reconciliation · Three-Way Merge · Audit Log Review
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Rule, Policy & Commitment
Rationale: Source Of Truth Table operates by assigns standing authoritative sources by field, state, and context and governs future conflict resolution. That concrete deployed or enacted form is Rule, Policy & Commitment under the frozen taxonomy.
Nearest alternative: Representation, Specification & Plan — Although Representation, Specification & Plan can support this mechanism, the frozen evidence makes its operative form the act that assigns standing authoritative sources by field, state, and context and governs future conflict resolution; the alternative is therefore secondary rather than defining.
Review outcome: Adjudicated after independent review; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Library & Information Science
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Universal
Rationale: A table that predetermines the authoritative system or role for each field is an authoritative-metadata and record-governance artifact. NARA and NIST explicitly formalize authoritative source, origin, provider, and pedigree metadata.
Related originating lineages:
- Accounting & Auditing — Accounting, auditing, and controlled-resource stewardship supplies a parallel or contributing lineage for the mechanism's defining operation: a declarative table that names, in advance, which system or role is authoritative for each field, state, or jurisdiction, so any later conflict has a predetermined winner.
- Computer Science & Software Engineering — Declarative conflict resolution prevents divergent replicas from competing ad hoc.
- Data Science & Analytics — data_science contributes data science, analytics, and operational monitoring to this mechanism's defining operation—A declarative table that names, in advance, which system or role is authoritative for each field, state, or jurisdiction, so any later conflict has a predetermined winner—without displacing the selected primary historical lineage.
- Law & Governance — Jurisdictional tables preassign legitimate decision rights.
- Organizational & Management Science — organizational_management contributes organizational design, management, and operational governance to this mechanism's defining operation—A declarative table that names, in advance, which system or role is authoritative for each field, state, or jurisdiction, so any later conflict has a predetermined winner—without displacing the selected primary historical lineage.
Review resolution: The blind reviewers disagree on primary lineage (organizational_management versus library_information_science). Authoritative or primary research supports library_information_science as the best historical origin: A table that predetermines the authoritative system or role for each field is an authoritative-metadata and record-governance artifact. NARA and NIST explicitly formalize authoritative source, origin, provider, and pedigree metadata. The cited National Archives, Records Management Profile: Authoritative Metadata Registry; NISTIR 8112, Provenance and Authoritative-Source Metadata directly supports the mechanism's defining operation. All independently supported contributing domains are retained without an arbitrary cap. origin_mode=cross_disciplinary_synthesis records lineage, while domain_reach=universal records later applicability separately from provenance.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Researched adjudication after independent review; high confidence.
Sources consulted:
- National Archives, Records Management Profile: Authoritative Metadata Registry
- NISTIR 8112, Provenance and Authoritative-Source Metadata
Notes¶
The table is upstream of repair, not part of it: it is closest in spirit to Source-of-Truth Assignment, the pattern of choosing authority before divergence. It earns its place under Reconciliation After Drift because a repair cycle that lacks a pre-declared authority map must re-argue "who wins" on every conflict — the table is the artifact that makes those repairs consistent instead of ad hoc.
[n1] A system of record is the authoritative source for a given data element — the copy that governs when other systems hold conflicting values. A source-of-truth table generalizes the idea past a single whole-record designation to per-field, per-context authority, which is what real organizations, where no one system owns everything, actually need. ↩